FOOTNOTES:

My tutor was the Rev. H. H. Knapp (practically all tutors were clergymen in those days). He was a reputed whig, an easy and kind-tempered man with a sense of scholarship, but no power of discipline, and no energy of desire to impress himself upon his pupils. I recollect but one piece of advice received later from him. It was that I should form my poetical taste upon Darwin, whose poems (the 'Botanic Garden' and 'Loves of the Plants') I obediently read through in consequence. I was placed in the middle remove fourth form, a place slightly better than the common run, but inferior to what a boy of good preparation or real excellence would have taken. My nearest friend of the first period was W. W. Parr, a boy of intelligence, something over my age, next above me in the school.At this time there was not in me any desire to know or to excel. My first pursuits were football and then cricket; the first I did not long pursue, and in the second I never managed to rise above mediocrity and what was termed 'the twenty-two.' There was a barrister named Henry Hall Joy, a connection of my father through his first wife, and a man who had taken a first-class at Oxford. He was very kind to me, and had made some efforts to inspire me with a love of books, if not of knowledge. Indeed I had read Froissart, and Hume with Smollett, but only for the battles, and always skipping when I came to the sections headed 'A Parliament.' Joy had a taste for classics, and made visions for me of honours at Oxford. But the subject only danced before my eyes as a will-of-the-wisp, and without attracting me. I remained stagnant without heart orhope. A change however arrived about Easter 1822. My 'remove' was then under Hawtrey (afterwards head-master and provost), who was always on the lookout for any bud which he could warm with a little sunshine.

At this time there was not in me any desire to know or to excel. My first pursuits were football and then cricket; the first I did not long pursue, and in the second I never managed to rise above mediocrity and what was termed 'the twenty-two.' There was a barrister named Henry Hall Joy, a connection of my father through his first wife, and a man who had taken a first-class at Oxford. He was very kind to me, and had made some efforts to inspire me with a love of books, if not of knowledge. Indeed I had read Froissart, and Hume with Smollett, but only for the battles, and always skipping when I came to the sections headed 'A Parliament.' Joy had a taste for classics, and made visions for me of honours at Oxford. But the subject only danced before my eyes as a will-of-the-wisp, and without attracting me. I remained stagnant without heart orhope. A change however arrived about Easter 1822. My 'remove' was then under Hawtrey (afterwards head-master and provost), who was always on the lookout for any bud which he could warm with a little sunshine.

He always described Hawtrey as the life of the school, the man to whom Eton owed more than to any of her sons during the century. Though not his pupil, it was from him that Gladstone, when in the fourth form, received for the first time incentives to exertion. 'It was entirely due to Hawtrey,' he records in a fragment, 'that I first owed the reception of a spark, thedivinae particulam aurae, and conceived a dim idea, that in some time, manner, and degree, I might come to know. Even then, as I had really no instructor, my efforts at Eton, down to 1827, were perhaps of the purest plodding ever known.'

Evidently he was not a boy of special mark during the first three years at Eaton. In the evening he played chess and cards, and usually lost. He claimed in after life that he had once taken a drive in a hired tandem, but Etonians who knew him as a schoolboy decided that an aspiring memory here made him boast of crimes that were not his. He was assiduous in the Eton practice of working a small boat, whether skiff, funny, or wherry, single-handed. In the masquerade of Montem he figured complacently in all the glories of the costume of a Greek patriot, for he was a faithful Canningite; the heroic struggle against the Turk was at its fiercest, and it was the year when Byron died at Missolonghi. Of Montem as an institution he thought extremely ill, 'the whole thing a wretched waste of time and money, a most ingenious contrivance to exhibit us as baboons, a bore in the full sense of the word.' He did not stand aside from the harmless gaieties of boyish life, but he rigidly refused any part in boyish indecorums. He was, in short, just the diligent, cheerful, healthy-minded schoolboy that any good father would have his son to be. He enjoys himself with his brother at the Christopher, and is glad to record that 'Keate did not make any jaw about being so late.' Half a dozen of them met every whole holiday orhalf, and went up Salt Hill to bully the fat waiter, eat toasted cheese, and drink egg-wine.

SCHOOL DAYS

He started, as we have already seen, in middle fourth form. In the spring of 1822 Hawtrey said to him: 'Continue to do as well as this, and I will send you up for good again before the fourth of June.' Before the end of June, he tells his sailor brother of his success: 'It far exceeds the most sanguine expectations I ever entertained. I have got into the remove between the fourth and fifth forms. I have been sent up for good a second time, and have taken seven places.' In the summer of 1823 he announces that he has got into the fifth form after taking sixteen places, and here instead of fagging he acquires the blessed power himself to fag. In passing he launches, for the first recorded time, against the master of the remove from which he has just been promoted, an invective that in volume and intensity anticipates the wrath of later attacks on Neapolitan kings and Turkish sultans.

His letters written from Eton breathe in every line the warm breath of family affection, and of all those natural pieties that had so firm a root in him from the beginning to the end. Of the later store of genius and force that the touch of time was so soon to kindle into full glow, they gave but little indication. We smile at the precociouscopia fandithat at thirteen describes the language of an admonishing acquaintance as 'so friendly, manly, sound, and disinterested that notwithstanding his faults I must always think well of him.' He sends contributions to his brother's scrap-book, and one of the first of them, oddly enough, in view of one of the great preoccupations of his later life, is a copy of Lord Edward Fitzgerald's stanzas on the night of his arrest:—

'O Ireland, my country, the hour

Of thy pride and thy splendour has passed.

And the chain which was spurned in thy moment of power,

Hangs heavy around thee at last.'

The temper and dialect of evangelical religion are always there. A friend of the family dies, and the boy pours out his regret, but after all what is the merely natural death ofDr. N. compared with the awful state of a certain clergyman, also an intimate friend, who has not only been guilty of attending a fancy ball, but has followed that vicious prelude by even worse enormities, unnamed, that surely cannot escape the vigilance and the reproof of his bishop?

His father is the steady centre of his life. 'My father,' he writes to his brother, 'is as active in mind and projects as ever; he has two principal plans now in embryo. One of these is a railroad between Liverpool and Manchester for the conveyance of goods by locomotive-steam-engine. The other is for building a bridge over the Mersey at Runcorn.' In May 1827, the Gloucester and Berkeley canal is opened: 'a great and enterprising undertaking, but still there is no fear of it beating Liverpool.' Meanwhile, 'what prodigiously quick travelling to leave Eton at twelve on Monday, and reach home at eight on Tuesday!' 'I have,' he says in 1826, 'lately been writing several letters in theLiverpool Courier.' His father had been attacked in the local prints for sundry economic inconsistencies, and the controversial pen that was to know no rest for more than seventy years to come, was now first employed, like the pious Æneas bearing off Anchises, in the filial duty of repelling his sire's assailants. Ignorant of his nameless champion, John Gladstone was much amused and interested by the anonymous 'Friend to Fair Dealing,' while the son was equally diverted by the criticisms and conjectures of the parent.

YOUTHFUL READING

With the formidable Keate the boy seems to have fared remarkably well, and there are stories that he was even one of the tyrant's favourites.[26]His school work was diligentlysupplemented. His daily reading in 1826 covers a good deal of miscellaneous ground, including Molière and Racine, Blair'sSermons('not very substantial'),Tom Jones, Tomline'sLife of Pitt, Waterland'sCommentaries, Leslieon Deism, Locke'sDefence of The Reasonableness of Christianity, which he finds excellent;Paradise Lost, Milton'sLatin PoemsandEpitaphium Damonis('exquisite'), Massinger'sFatal Dowry('most excellent'), Ben Jonson'sAlchemist; Scott, including theBride of Lammermoor('a beautiful tale, indeed,' and in after life his favourite of them all), Burke, Clarendon, and others of the shining host whose very names are music to a scholar's ear. In the same year he reads 'a most violent article on Milton by Macaulay, fair and unfair, clever and silly, allegorical and bombastic, republican and anti-episcopal—a strange composition, indeed.' In 1827 he went steadily through the second half of Gibbon, whom he pronounces, 'elegant and acute as he is, not so clear, so able, so attractive as Hume; does not impress my mind so much.' In the same year he reads Coxe'sWalpole,Don Quixote, Hallam'sConstitutional History,Measure for MeasureandMuch Ado, Massinger'sGrand Duke of Florence, Ford'sLove's Melancholy('much of it good, the end remarkably beautiful') andBroken Heart(which he liked better than either the other or'Tis Pity), Lockeon Toleration('much repetition').

There is, of course, a steady refrain of Greek iambics, Greek anapæsts, 'an easy and nice metre,' 'a hodge-podge lot of hendecasyllables,' and thirty alcaic stanzas for a holiday task. Mention is made of many sermons on 'Redeeming the time,' 'Weighed in the balance and found wanting,' 'Cease to do evil, learn to do well,' and the other ever unexhausted texts. One constant entry, we may be sure, is'Read Bible,' with Mant's notes. In a mood of deep piety he is prepared for confirmation. His appearance at this time was recalled by one who had been his fag, 'as a good-looking, rather delicate youth, with a pale face and brown curling hair, always tidy and well dressed.'[27]

He became captain of the fifth at the end of October 1826, and on February 20, 1827, Keate put him into the sixth. 'Was very civil, indeed; told me to take pains, etc.: to be careful in using my authority, etc.' He finds the sixth very preferable to all other parts of the school, both as regards pleasure and opportunity for improvement. They are more directly under the eye of Keate; he treats them with more civility and speaks to them differently. So the days follow one another very much alike—studious, cheerful, sociable, sedulous. The debates in parliament take up a good deal of his time, and he is overwhelmed by the horrible news of the defeat of the catholics in the House of Commons (March 8, 1827). On a summer's day in 1826, 'Mr. Canning here; inquired after me and missed me.' He was not at Eton but at home when he heard of Mr. Canning's death. 'Personally I must remember his kindness and condescension, especially when he spoke to me of some verses which H. Joy had injudiciously mentioned to him.'

DEBATING SOCIETY

Youthful intellect is imitative, and in a great school so impregnated as Eton with the spirit of public life and political association, the few boys with active minds mimicked the strife of parliament in their debating society, and copied the arts of journalism in theEton Miscellany. In both fields the young Gladstone took a leading part. The debating society was afflicted with 'the premonitory lethargy of death,' but the assiduous energy of Gaskell, seconded by the gifts of Gladstone, Hallam, and Doyle, soon sent a new pulse beating through it. The politics of the hour, that is to say everything not fifty years off, were forbidden ground; but the execution of Strafford or of his royal master, thedeposition of Richard II., the last four years of the reign of Queen Anne, the Peerage bill of 1719, the characters of Harley and Bolingbroke, were themes that could be made by ingenious youth to admit a hundred cunning sidelights upon the catholic question, the struggle of the Greeks for independence, the hard case of Queen Caroline, and the unlawfulness of swamping the tories in the House of Lords. On duller afternoons they argued on the relative claims of mathematics and metaphysics to be the better discipline of the human mind; whether duelling is or is not inconsistent with the character that we ought to seek; or whether the education of the poor is on the whole beneficial. It was on this last question (October 29, 1825) that the orator who made his last speech seventy years later, now made his first. 'Made my first or maiden speech at the society,' he enters in his diary, 'on education of the poor; funked less than I thought I should, by much.' It is a curious but a characteristic circumstance not that so many of his Eton speeches were written out, but that the manuscript should have been thriftily preserved by him all through the long space of intervening years. 'Mr. President,' it begins, 'in this land of liberty, in this age of increased and gradually increasing civilization, we shall hope to find few, if indeed any, among the higher classes who are eager or willing to obstruct the moral instruction and mental improvement of their fellow creatures in the humbler walks of life. If such there are, let them at length remember that the poor are endowed with the same reason, though not blessed with the same temporal advantages. Let them but admit, what I think no one can deny, that they are placed in an elevated situation principally for the purpose of doing good to their fellow creatures. Then by what argument can they repel, by what pretence can they evade the duty?' And so forth and so forth. Already we seem to hear the born speaker in the amplitude of rhetorical form in which, juvenile though it may be, a commonplace is cast. 'Is human grandeur so stable that they may deny to others that which they would in an humble situation desire themselves? Or has human pridereached such a pitch of arrogance that they have learned to defy both right and reason, to reject the laws of natural kindness that ought to reign in the breast of all, and to look on their fellow countrymen as the refuse of mankind?... Is it morally just or politically expedient to keep down the industry and genius of the artisan, to blast his rising hopes, to quell his spirit? A thirst for knowledge has arisen in the minds of the poor; let them satisfy it with wholesome nutriment and beware lest driven to despair,' et cetera. Crude enough, if we please; but the year was 1826, and we may feel that the boyish speaker is already on the generous side and has the gift of fruitful sympathies.

In the spacious tournaments of old history, we may smile to hear debating forms and ceremony applied to everlasting controversies. 'Sir,' he opens on one occasion, 'I declare that as far as regards myself, I shall have very little difficulty in stating my grounds on which I give my vote for James Graham [the Marquis of Montrose]. It is because I look upon him as a hero, not merely endowed with that animal ferocity which has often been the sole qualification which has obtained men that appellation from the multitude—I should be sorry indeed if he had no testimonials of his merits, save such as arise from the mad and thoughtless exclamations of popular applause.' In the same gallant style (Jan. 26, 1826) he votes for Marcus Aurelius, in answer to the question whether Trajan has any equal among the Roman emperors from Augustus onwards. Another time the question was between John Hampden and Clarendon. 'Sir, I look back with pleasure to the time when we unanimously declared our disapprobation of the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford. I wish I could hope for the same unanimity now, but I will endeavour to regulate myself by the same principles as directed me then.... Now, sir, with regard to the impeachment of the five members, it is really a little extraordinary to hear the honourable opener talking of the violence offered by the king, and the terror of the parliament. Sir, do we not all know that the king at that time had neither friends nor wealth?... Did the return of these members with a triumphant mobaccompanying them indicate terror? Did the demands of the parliament or the insolence of their language show it?' So he proceeds through all the well-worn arguments; and 'therefore it is,' he concludes, 'that I give my vote to the Earl of Clarendon, because he gave his support to the falling cause of monarchy; because he stood by his church and his king; because he adopted the part which loyalty, reason, and moderation combined to dictate.... Poverty, banishment, and disgrace he endured without a murmur; he still adhered to the cause of justice, he still denounced the advocates of rebellion, and if he failed in his reward in life, oh, sir, let us not deny it to him after death. In him, sir, I admire the sound philosopher, the rigid moralist, the upright statesman, the candid historian.... In Hampden I see the splendour of patriotic bravery obscured by the darkness of rebellion, and the faculties by which he might have been a real hero and real martyr, prostituted in the cause,' and so on, with all the promise of theos magna soniturum, of which time was to prove the resources so inexhaustible. On one great man he passed a final judgment that years did not change:—'Debate on Sir R. Walpole: Hallam, Gaskell, Pickering, and Doyle spoke. Voted for him. Last time, when I was almost entirely ignorant of the subject, against him. There were sundry considerable blots, but nothing to overbalance or to spoil the great merit of being the bulwark of the protestant succession, his commercial measures, and in general his pacific policy.'[28]

ETON MISCELLANY

As for theEton Miscellany, which was meant to follow earlier attempts in the same line, the best-natured critic cannot honestly count it dazzling. Such things rarely are; for youth, though the most adorable of our human stages, cannot yet have knowledge or practice enough, whether in life or books, to make either good prose or stirring verse, unless by a miracle of genius, and even that inspiration is but occasional. TheMicrocosm(1786-87) and theEtonian(1818), with such hands as Canning and Frere, Moultrie and Praed, were well enough. The newcomer was a long way behind these in the freshness, brilliance, daring,by which only such juvenile performances can either please or interest. George Selwyn and Gladstone were joint editors, and each provided pretty copious effusions. 'I cannot keep my temper,' he wrote afterwards in his diary in 1835, on turning over theMiscellany, 'in perusing my own (with few exceptions) execrable productions.' Certainly his contributions have no particular promise or savour, no hint of the strong pinions into which the half-fledged wings were in time to expand. Their motion, such as it is, must be pronounced mechanical; their phrase and cadence conventional. Even when sincere feelings were deeply stirred, the flight cannot be called high. The most moving public event in his schooldays was undoubtedly the death of Canning, and to Gladstone the stroke was almost personal. In September 1827 he tells his mother that he has for the first time visited Westminster Abbey,—his object, an eager pilgrimage to the newly tenanted grave of his hero, and in theMiscellanyhe pays a double tribute. In the prose we hear sonorous things about meridian splendour, premature extinction, and inscrutable wisdom; about falling, like his great master Pitt, a victim to his proud and exalted station; about being firm in principle and conciliatory in action, the friend of improvement and the enemy of innovation. Nor are the versified reflections in Westminster Abbey much more striking:—

Oft in the sculptured aisle and swelling dome,

The yawning grave hath given the proud a home;

Yet never welcomed from his bright career

A mightier victim than it welcomed here:

Again the tomb may yawn—again may death

Claim the last forfeit of departing breath;

Yet ne'er enshrine in slumber dark and deep

A nobler, loftier prey than where thine ashes sleep.

Excellent in feeling, to be sure; but as a trial of poetic delicacy or power, wanting the true note, and only worth recalling for an instant as we go.

III

FRIENDS

As nearly always happens, it was less by school work or spoken addresses in juvenile debate, or early attempts in the great and difficult art of written composition, than byblithe and congenial comradeship that the mind of the young Gladstone was stimulated, opened, strengthened. In after days he commemorated among his friends George Selwyn, afterwards bishop of New Zealand and of Lichfield, 'a man whose character is summed up, from alpha to omega, in the single word, noble, and whose high office, in a large measure, it was to reintroduce among the anglican clergy the pure heroic type.' Another was Francis Doyle, 'whose genial character supplied a most pleasant introduction for his unquestionable poetic genius.' A third was James Milnes Gaskell, a youth endowed with precocious ripeness of political faculty, an enthusiast, and with a vivacious humour that enthusiasts often miss. Doyle said of him that his nurse must have lulled him to sleep by parliamentary reports, and his first cries on awaking in his cradle must have been 'hear, hear'! Proximity of rooms 'gave occasion or aid to the formation of another very valuable friendship, that with Gerald Wellesley, afterwards dean of Windsor, which lasted, to my great profit, for some sixty years, until that light was put out.' In Gaskell's room four or five of them would meet, and discuss without restraint the questions of politics that were too modern to be tolerated in public debate. Most of them were friendly to catholic emancipation, and to the steps by which Huskisson, supported by Canning, was cautiously treading in the path towards free trade. The brightest star in this cheerful constellation was the rare youth who, though his shining course was run in two-and-twenty years, yet in that scanty span was able to impress with his vigorous understanding and graceful imagination more than one of the loftiest minds of his time.[29]Arthur Hallam was a couple of years younger than Gladstone, no narrow gulf at that age; but such was the sympathy of genius, such the affinities of intellectual interest and aspiration spoken and unspoken, such the charm and the power of the younger with the elder, that rapid instinct made them close comrades. They clubbed together their rolls and butter, and breakfasted in oneanother's rooms. Hallam was not strong enough for boating, so the more sinewy Gladstone used to scull him up to the Shallows, and he regarded this toilsome carrying of an idle passenger up stream as proof positive of no common value set upon his passenger's company. They took walks together, often to the monument of Gray, close by the churchyard of the elegy; arguing about the articles and the creeds; about Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley; about free will, for Hallam was precociously full of Jonathan Edwards; about politics, old and new, living and dead; about Pitt and Fox, and Canning and Peel, for Gladstone was a tory and Hallam pure whig. Hallam was described by Mr. Gladstone in his old age as one who 'enjoyed work, enjoyed society; and games which he did not enjoy he left contentedly aside. His temper was as sweet as his manners were winning. His conduct was without a spot or even a speck. He was that rare and blessed creature,anima naturaliter Christiana. He read largely, and though not superficial, yet with an extraordinary speed. He had no high or exclusive ways.' Thus, as so many have known in that happy dawn of life, before any of the imps of disorder and confusion have found their way into the garden, it was the most careless hours,—careless of all save truth and beauty,—that were the hours best filled.

ARTHUR HALLAM

Youth will commonly do anything rather than write letters, but the friendship of this pair stood even that test. The pages are redolent of a living taste for good books and serious thoughts, and amply redeemed from strain or affectation by touches of gay irony and the collegian's banter. Hallam applies to Gladstone Diomede's lines about Odysseus, of eager heart and spirit so manful in all manner of toils, as the only comrade whom a man would choose.[30]But the Greek hero was no doubt a complex character, and the parallel is taken by Gladstone as an equivocal compliment. So Hallam begs him at any rate to accept the other description, how when he uttered his mighty voice from his chest, and words fell like flakes of snow in winter, then could no mortal man contend with Odysseus.[31]As happy a forecast for thegreat orator of their generation, as when in 1829 he told Gladstone that Tennyson promised fair to be its greatest poet. Hallam's share in the correspondence reminds us of the friendship of two other Etonians ninety years before, of the letters and verses that Gray wrote to Richard West; there is the same literary sensibility, the same kindness, but there is what Gray and West felt not, the breath of a busy and changing age. Each of these two had the advantage of coming from a home where politics were not mere gossip about persons and paragraphs, but were matters of trained and continued interest. The son of one of the most eminent of the brilliant band of the whig writers of that day, Hallam passes glowing eulogies on the patriotism and wisdom of the whigs in coalescing with Canning against the bigotry of the king and the blunders of Wellington and Peel; he contrasts this famous crisis with a similar crisis in the early part of the reign of George III.; and observes how much higher all parties stood in the balance of disinterestedness and public virtue. He goes to the opera and finds Zucchelli admirable, Coradori divine. He wonders (1826) about Sir Walter's forthcoming life of Napoleon, how with his ultra principles Scott will manage to make a hero of the Corsican. He asks if Gladstone has read 'the newVivian Grey' (1827)—the second part of that amazing fiction into which an author, not much older than themselves and destined to strange historic relations with one of them, had the year before burst upon the world. Hallam is not without the graceful melancholy of youth, so different from that other melancholy of ripe years and the deepening twilight. Under all is the recurrent note of a grave refrain that fatal issues made pathetic.

'Never since the time when I first knew you,' Hallam wrote to Gladstone (June 23, 1830), 'have I ceased to love and respect your character ... It will be my proudest thought that I may henceforth act worthily of their affection who, like yourself, have influenced my mind for good in the earliest season of its development. Circumstance, my dear Gladstone, has indeed separated our paths, but it can never do away with what has been. The stamp of each of our minds is on the other. Many a habit of thought in each ismodified, many a feeling is associated, which never would have existed in that combination, had it not been for the old familiar days when we lived together.'

In the summer of 1827 Hallam quitted Eton for the journey to Italy that set so important a mark on his literary growth, and he bade his friend farewell in words of characteristic affection. 'Perhaps you will pardon my doing by writing what I hardly dare trust myself to do by words. I received your superb Burke yesterday; and hope to find it a memorial of past and a pledge for future friendship through both our lives. It is perhaps rather bold in me to ask a favour immediately on acknowledging so great a one; but you would please me, and oblige me greatly, if you will accept this copy of my father's book. It may serve when I am separated from you, to remind you of one, whose warmest pleasure it will always be to subscribe himself, Your most faithful friend, A. H. H.'

A few entries from the schoolboy's diary may serve to bring the daily scene before us, and show what his life was like:—

October 3, 1826.—Holiday. Walk with Hallam. Wrote over theme. Read Clarendon. Wrote speech for Saturday week. Poor enough. Did punishment set by Keate to all the fifth form for being late in church.October 6.—Fin. second Olympiad of Pindar.... Clarendon. Did an abstract of about 100 pages. Wrote speech for to-morrow in favour of Cæsar.November 13.—Play. Breakfast with Hallam. Read a little Clarendon. Read over tenth Satire of Juvenal and read the fifth, making quotations to it and some other places. Did a few verses.November 14.—Holiday. Wrote over theme. Did verses. Walked with Hallam and Doyle. Read papers and debates.... Read 200 lines ofTrachiniae. A littleGil Blasin French, and a little Clarendon.November 18.—Play. Read papers, etc. Finished Blair'sDissertation on Ossian. FinishedTrachiniae. Did 3 props. of Euclid. Question: Was deposition of Richard II. justifiable?Voted no. Good debate. Finished the delightful orationPro Milone.November 21.—Holiday.... Part of article inEdinburgh ReviewonIcon Basilike. Read Herodotus, Clarendon. Did 3 props. Scrambling and leaping expedition with Hallam, Doyle, and Gaskell.November 30.—Holiday. Read Herodotus. Breakfasted with Gaskell. He and Hallam drank wine with me after 4. Walked with Hallam. Did verses. Finished first book of Euclid. Read a littleCharles XII.February 27, 1827.—Holiday. Dressed (knee-breeches, etc.) and went into school with Selwyn. Found myself not at all in a funk, and went through my performance with tolerable comfort. Durnford followed me, then Selwyn, who spoke well. Horrors of speaking chiefly in the name.March 20.—My father has lost his seat, and Berwick a representative ten times too good for it. Wrote to my father, no longer M.P.; when we have forgotten the manner, the matter is not so bad.March 24.—Half-holiday. Play and learning it. Walked with Hallam, read papers. Hallam drank wine with me after dinner. Finished 8th vol. of Gibbon; read account of Palmyra in second volume; did more verses on it. Much jaw about nothing at Society, and absurd violence.May 31.—Finished iambics. Wrote over for tutor. Played cricket in the Upper Club, and had tea in poet's walk [an entry repeated this summer].June 26.—Wrote over theme. ReadIphigenie. Called up in Homer. Sculled Hallam to Surly after 6. Went to see a cricket match after 4.

October 6.—Fin. second Olympiad of Pindar.... Clarendon. Did an abstract of about 100 pages. Wrote speech for to-morrow in favour of Cæsar.

November 13.—Play. Breakfast with Hallam. Read a little Clarendon. Read over tenth Satire of Juvenal and read the fifth, making quotations to it and some other places. Did a few verses.

November 14.—Holiday. Wrote over theme. Did verses. Walked with Hallam and Doyle. Read papers and debates.... Read 200 lines ofTrachiniae. A littleGil Blasin French, and a little Clarendon.

November 18.—Play. Read papers, etc. Finished Blair'sDissertation on Ossian. FinishedTrachiniae. Did 3 props. of Euclid. Question: Was deposition of Richard II. justifiable?Voted no. Good debate. Finished the delightful orationPro Milone.

November 21.—Holiday.... Part of article inEdinburgh ReviewonIcon Basilike. Read Herodotus, Clarendon. Did 3 props. Scrambling and leaping expedition with Hallam, Doyle, and Gaskell.

November 30.—Holiday. Read Herodotus. Breakfasted with Gaskell. He and Hallam drank wine with me after 4. Walked with Hallam. Did verses. Finished first book of Euclid. Read a littleCharles XII.

February 27, 1827.—Holiday. Dressed (knee-breeches, etc.) and went into school with Selwyn. Found myself not at all in a funk, and went through my performance with tolerable comfort. Durnford followed me, then Selwyn, who spoke well. Horrors of speaking chiefly in the name.

March 20.—My father has lost his seat, and Berwick a representative ten times too good for it. Wrote to my father, no longer M.P.; when we have forgotten the manner, the matter is not so bad.

March 24.—Half-holiday. Play and learning it. Walked with Hallam, read papers. Hallam drank wine with me after dinner. Finished 8th vol. of Gibbon; read account of Palmyra in second volume; did more verses on it. Much jaw about nothing at Society, and absurd violence.

May 31.—Finished iambics. Wrote over for tutor. Played cricket in the Upper Club, and had tea in poet's walk [an entry repeated this summer].

June 26.—Wrote over theme. ReadIphigenie. Called up in Homer. Sculled Hallam to Surly after 6. Went to see a cricket match after 4.

FAREWELL TO ETON

Gladstone's farewell to Eton came with Christmas (1827). He writes to his sister his last Etonian letter (December 2) before departure, and 'melancholy that departure is.' On the day before, he had made his valedictory speech to the Society, and the empty shelves and dismantled walls, the table strewn with papers, the books packed away in their boxes, have the effect of 'mingling in one lengthened mass all the boyish hopes and solicitudes and pleasures' of hisEton life. 'I have long ago made up my mind that I have of late been enjoying what will in all probability be, as far as my own individual case is concerned, the happiest years of my life. And they have fled! From these few facts do we not draw a train of reflections awfully important in their nature and extremely powerful in their impression on the mind?'

DR. KEATE

Two reminiscences of Eton always gave him, and those who listened to him, much diversion whenever chance brought them to his mind, and he has set them down in an autobiographic fragment, for which this is the place:—

To Dr. Keate nature had accorded a stature of only about five feet, or say five feet one; but by costume, voice, manner (including a little swagger), and character he made himself in every way the capital figure on the Eton stage, and his departure marked, I imagine, the departure of the old race of English public school masters, as the name of Dr. Busby seems to mark its introduction. In connection with his name I shall give two anecdotes separated by a considerable interval of years. About the year 1820, the eloquence of Dr. Edward Irving drew crowds to his church in London, which was presbyterian. It required careful previous arrangements to secure comfortable accommodation. The preacher was solemn, majestic (notwithstanding the squint), and impressive; carrying all the appearance of devoted earnestness. My father had on a certain occasion, when I was still a small Eton boy, taken time by the forelock, and secured the use of a convenient pew in the first rank of the gallery. From this elevated situation we surveyed at ease and leisure the struggling crowds below. The crush was everywhere great, but greatest of all in the centre aisle. Here the mass of human beings, mercilessly compressed, swayed continually backwards and forwards. There was I, looking down with infinite complacency and satisfaction from this honourable vantage ground upon the floor of the church, filled and packed as one of our public meetings is, with people standing and pushing. What was my emotion, my joy, my exultation, when I espied among this humiliated mass, struggling and buffeted—whom but Keate! Keate the master of our existence, the tyrant of our days! Pure, unalloyed,unadulterated rapture! Such a περιπέτεια, such a reversal of human conditions of being, as that now exhibited between the Eton lower boy uplifted to the luxurious gallery pew, and the head-master of Eton, whom I was accustomed to see in the roomy deck of the upper school with vacant space and terror all around him, it must be hard for any one to conceive, except the two who were the subjects of it. Never, never, have I forgotten that moment.[32]I will now, after the manner of novelists, ask my reader to effect along with me, a transition of some eighteen years, and to witness another, and if not a more complete yet a worthier, turning of the tables. In the year 1841 there was a very special Eton dinner held in Willis's Rooms to commemorate the fourth centenary of the ancient school. Lord Morpeth, afterwards Lord Carlisle, was in the chair. On his right, not far off him, was Dr. Keate, to whom I chanced to have a seat almost immediately opposite. In those days, at public dinners, cheering was marked by gradations. As the Queen was suspected of sympathy with the liberal government of Lord Melbourne which advised her, the toast of the sovereign was naturally received with a moderate amount of acclamation, decently and thriftily doled out. On the other hand the Queen Dowager either was, or was believed to be, conservative; and her health consequently figured as the toast of the evening, and drew forth, as a matter of course, by far its loudest acclamation. So much was routine; and we went through it as usual. But the real toast of the evening was yet to come. I suppose it to be beyond doubt that of the assembled company the vastly preponderating majority had been under his sway at Eton; and if, when in that condition, any one of them had been asked how he liked Dr. Keate, he would beyond question have answered, 'Keate? Oh, I hate him.' It is equally beyond doubt that to the persons of the whole of them, with the rarest exceptions, it had been the ease of Dr. Keate to administer the salutary correction of the birch. But upon this occasion, when his name had been announced the scene was indescribable. Queen and Queen Dowager alike vanished into insignificance. The roar of cheeringhad a beginning, but never knew satiety or end. Like the huge waves at Biarritz, the floods of cheering continually recommenced; the whole process was such that we seemed all to have lost our self-possession and to be hardly able to keep our seats. When at length it became possible Keate rose: that is to say, his head was projected slightly over the heads of his two neighbours. He struggled to speak; I will not say I heard every syllable, for there were no syllables; speak he could not. He tried in vain to mumble a word or two, but wholly failed, recommenced the vain struggle and sat down. It was certainly one of the most moving spectacles that in my whole life I have witnessed.

I will now, after the manner of novelists, ask my reader to effect along with me, a transition of some eighteen years, and to witness another, and if not a more complete yet a worthier, turning of the tables. In the year 1841 there was a very special Eton dinner held in Willis's Rooms to commemorate the fourth centenary of the ancient school. Lord Morpeth, afterwards Lord Carlisle, was in the chair. On his right, not far off him, was Dr. Keate, to whom I chanced to have a seat almost immediately opposite. In those days, at public dinners, cheering was marked by gradations. As the Queen was suspected of sympathy with the liberal government of Lord Melbourne which advised her, the toast of the sovereign was naturally received with a moderate amount of acclamation, decently and thriftily doled out. On the other hand the Queen Dowager either was, or was believed to be, conservative; and her health consequently figured as the toast of the evening, and drew forth, as a matter of course, by far its loudest acclamation. So much was routine; and we went through it as usual. But the real toast of the evening was yet to come. I suppose it to be beyond doubt that of the assembled company the vastly preponderating majority had been under his sway at Eton; and if, when in that condition, any one of them had been asked how he liked Dr. Keate, he would beyond question have answered, 'Keate? Oh, I hate him.' It is equally beyond doubt that to the persons of the whole of them, with the rarest exceptions, it had been the ease of Dr. Keate to administer the salutary correction of the birch. But upon this occasion, when his name had been announced the scene was indescribable. Queen and Queen Dowager alike vanished into insignificance. The roar of cheeringhad a beginning, but never knew satiety or end. Like the huge waves at Biarritz, the floods of cheering continually recommenced; the whole process was such that we seemed all to have lost our self-possession and to be hardly able to keep our seats. When at length it became possible Keate rose: that is to say, his head was projected slightly over the heads of his two neighbours. He struggled to speak; I will not say I heard every syllable, for there were no syllables; speak he could not. He tried in vain to mumble a word or two, but wholly failed, recommenced the vain struggle and sat down. It was certainly one of the most moving spectacles that in my whole life I have witnessed.

AT WILMSLOW

Some months passed between leaving Eton and going to Oxford. In January 1828, Gladstone went to reside with Dr. Turner at Wilmslow in Cheshire, and remained there until Turner was made Bishop of Calcutta. The bishop's pupil afterwards testified to his amiability, refinement, and devoutness; but the days of his energy were past, and 'the religious condition of the parish was depressing.' Among the neighbouring families, with whom he made acquaintance while at Wilmslow, were the Gregs of Quarry Bank, a refined and philanthropic household, including among the sons William R. Greg (born in the same year as Mr. Gladstone), that ingenious, urbane, interesting, and independent mind, whose speculations, dissolvent and other, were afterwards to take an effective place in the writings of the time. 'I fear he is a unitarian,' the young churchman mentions to his father, and gives sundry reasons for that sombre apprehension; it was, indeed, only too well founded.

While at Wilmslow (Feb. 5, 1828) Gladstone was taken to dine with the rector of Alderley—'an extremely gentlemanly and said to be a very clever man,'—afterwards to be known as the liberal and enlightened Edward Stanley, Bishop of Norwich, and father of Arthur Stanley, the famous dean. Him, on this occasion, the young Gladstone seems to have seen for the first time. Arthur Stanley was six years his junior, and there was then some idea of sending him to Eton. As it happened, he too was a pupil atRawson's at Seaforth, and in the summer after the meeting at Alderley the two lads met again. The younger of them has described how he was invited to breakfast with William Gladstone at Seaforth House; in what grand style they breakfasted, how he devoured strawberries, swam the Newfoundland dog in the pond, looked at books and pictures, and talked to W. Gladstone 'almost all the time about all sorts of things. He is so very good-natured, and I like him very much. He talked a great deal about Eton, and said that it was a very good place for those who liked boating and Latin verses. He was very good-natured to us all the time, and lent me books to read when we went away.'[33]A few months later, as all the world knows, Stanley, happily for himself and for all of us, went not to Eton but to Rugby, where Arnold had just entered on his bold and noble task of changing the face of education in England.

FOOTNOTES:[23]Gleanings, vii. p. 138.[24]A story sometimes told of Provost Goodall.[25]At Marlborough, Feb. 3, 1877; at Mill Hill School, June 11, 1879.[26]Doyle tells a story of the boy being flogged for bringing wine into his study. When questioned on this, Mr. Gladstone said, 'Iwasflogged, but not for anything connected in any way with wine, of which, by the by, my father supplied me with a small amount, and insisted upon my drinking it, or some of it, all the time that I was at Eton. The reason why I was flogged was this. I was præpostor of the remove on a certain day, and from kindness or good nature was induced to omit from the list of boys against whom H. [the master] had complained, and who ought to have been flogged next day, the names of three offenders. The three boys in question got round me with a story that their friends were coming down from London to see them, and that if they were put down on the flogging list they could not meet their friends. Next day when I went into school H. roared out in a voice of thunder, "Gladstone, put down your own name on the list of boys to be flogged."' Mr. Gladstone on this occasion told another tale of this worthy's 'humour.' 'One day H. called out to the præpostor, “Write down Hamilton's name to be flogged for breaking my window.” “I never broke your window, sir,” exclaimed Hamilton. “Præpostor,” retorted H., “write down Hamilton's name for breaking my window and lying.” “Upon my soul, sir, I did not do it,” ejaculated the boy, with increased emphasis. “Præpostor, write down Hamilton's name for breaking my window, lying, and swearing.” Against this final sentence there was no appeal, and, accordingly, Hamilton was flogged (I believe unjustly) next day.'—F. Lawley inDaily Telegraph, May 20, 1898.[27]Temple Bar, Feb. 1883.[28]Feb. 10, 1827.[29]Mr. Gladstone fixed on two of the elegies ofIn Memoriamas most directly conveying the image of Arthur Hallam, cviii. and cxxviii.[30]Iliad, iii. 221.[31]Ibid.x. 242.[32]I have heard him tell this story, and Garrick himself could not have reproduced a schoolboy's glee with more admirable accent and gesture.[33]Prothero'sLife of Dean Stanley, 1. p. 22.

[23]Gleanings, vii. p. 138.

[24]A story sometimes told of Provost Goodall.

[25]At Marlborough, Feb. 3, 1877; at Mill Hill School, June 11, 1879.

[26]Doyle tells a story of the boy being flogged for bringing wine into his study. When questioned on this, Mr. Gladstone said, 'Iwasflogged, but not for anything connected in any way with wine, of which, by the by, my father supplied me with a small amount, and insisted upon my drinking it, or some of it, all the time that I was at Eton. The reason why I was flogged was this. I was præpostor of the remove on a certain day, and from kindness or good nature was induced to omit from the list of boys against whom H. [the master] had complained, and who ought to have been flogged next day, the names of three offenders. The three boys in question got round me with a story that their friends were coming down from London to see them, and that if they were put down on the flogging list they could not meet their friends. Next day when I went into school H. roared out in a voice of thunder, "Gladstone, put down your own name on the list of boys to be flogged."' Mr. Gladstone on this occasion told another tale of this worthy's 'humour.' 'One day H. called out to the præpostor, “Write down Hamilton's name to be flogged for breaking my window.” “I never broke your window, sir,” exclaimed Hamilton. “Præpostor,” retorted H., “write down Hamilton's name for breaking my window and lying.” “Upon my soul, sir, I did not do it,” ejaculated the boy, with increased emphasis. “Præpostor, write down Hamilton's name for breaking my window, lying, and swearing.” Against this final sentence there was no appeal, and, accordingly, Hamilton was flogged (I believe unjustly) next day.'—F. Lawley inDaily Telegraph, May 20, 1898.

[27]Temple Bar, Feb. 1883.

[28]Feb. 10, 1827.

[29]Mr. Gladstone fixed on two of the elegies ofIn Memoriamas most directly conveying the image of Arthur Hallam, cviii. and cxxviii.

[30]Iliad, iii. 221.

[31]Ibid.x. 242.

[32]I have heard him tell this story, and Garrick himself could not have reproduced a schoolboy's glee with more admirable accent and gesture.

[33]Prothero'sLife of Dean Stanley, 1. p. 22.

ToC

OXFORD

(October 1828-December 1831)

Steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—M. Arnold.

Glorious to most are the days of life in a great school, but it is at college that aspiring talent first enters on its inheritance. Oxford was slowly awakening from a long age of lethargy. Toryism of a stolid clownish type still held the thrones of collegiate power. Yet the eye of an imaginative scholar as he gazed upon the grey walls, reared by piety, munificence, and love of learning in a far-off time, might well discern behind an unattractive screen of academic sloth, the venerable past, not dim and cold, but in its traditions rich, nourishing, and alive. Such an one could see before him present days of honourable emulation and stirring acquisition—fit prelude of a man's part to play in a strenuous future. It is from Gladstone's introduction into this enchanted and inspiring world, that we recognise the beginning of the wonderful course that was to show how great a thing the life of a man may be made.

CHRIST CHURCH

The Eton boy became the Christ Church man, and there began residence, October 10, 1828. Mr. Gladstone's rooms, during most of his undergraduate life, were on the right hand, and on the first floor of the staircase on the right, as one enters by the Canterbury gate. He tells his mother that they are in a very fashionable part of the college, and mentions as a delightful fact, that Gaskell andSeymer have rooms on the same floor. Samuel Smith was head until 1831, when he was succeeded by the more celebrated Dr. Gaisford, always described by Mr. Gladstone as a splendid scholar, but a bad dean. Gaisford's excellent services to the Greek learning of his day are unquestioned, and he had the signal merit of speech, Spartan brevity. For a short time in 1806 he had been tutor to Peel. When Lord Liverpool offered him the Greek professorship, with profuse compliments on his erudition, the learned man replied, 'My Lord, I have received your letter, and accede to the contents.—Yours, T. G.' And to the complaining parent of an undergraduate he wrote, 'Dear Sir,—Such letters as yours are a great annoyance to your obedient servant T. Gaisford.'[34]This laconic gift the dean evidently had not time to transmit to all of his flock.

Christ Church in those days was infested with some rowdyism, and in one bear-fight an undergraduate was actually killed. In the chapel the new undergraduate found little satisfaction, for the service was scarcely performed with common decency. There seems, however, to have been no irreconcilable prejudice against reading, and in the schools the college was at the top of its academic fame. The influence of Cyril Jackson, the dean in Peel's time, whose advice to Peel and, other pupils to work like a tiger, and not to be afraid of killing one's self by work, was still operative.[35]At the summer examination of 1830, Christ Church won five first classes out of ten. Most commoners, according to a letter of Gaskell's, had from three hundred and fifty to five hundred pounds a year; but gentlemen commoners like Acland and Gaskell had from five to six hundred. At the end of 1829, Mr. Gladstone received a studentshiphonoris causa, by nomination of the dean—a system that would not be approved in our epoch ofcompetitive examination, but still an advance upon the time-honoured practice of deans and canons disposing of studentships on grounds of private partiality without reference to desert. We may assume that the dean was not indifferent to academic promise when he told Gladstone, very good-naturedly and civilly, that he had determined to offer him his nomination. The student designate wrote a theme, read it out before the chapter, passed a nominal, or even farcical, examination in Homer and Virgil, was elected as matter of course by the chapter, and after chapel on the morning of Christmas eve, having taken several oaths, was formally admitted in the name of the Holy Trinity.

Mr. Biscoe, his classical tutor, was a successful lecturer on Aristotle, especially on the Rhetoric. With Charles Wordsworth, son of the master of Trinity at Cambridge, and afterwards Bishop of Saint Andrews, he read for scholarship, apparently not wholly to his own satisfaction. While still an undergraduate, he writes to his father (Nov. 2, 1830), 'I am wretchedly deficient in the knowledge of modern languages, literature, and history; and the classical knowledge acquired here, though sound, accurate, and useful, yet is not such as tocompletean education.' It looked, in truth, as if the caustic saying of a brilliant colleague of his in later years were not at the time unjust, as now it would happily be, that it was a battle between Eton and education, and Eton had won.

Mr. Gladstone never to the end of his days ceased to be grateful that Oxford was chosen for his university. At Cambridge, as he said in discussing Hallam's choice, the pure refinements of scholarship were more in fashion than the study of the great masterpieces of antiquity in their substance and spirit. The classical examination at Oxford, on the other hand, was divided into the three elastic departments of scholarship and poetry, history, and philosophy. In this list, history somewhat outweighed the scholarship, and philosophy was somewhat more regarded than history. In each case the examination turned more on contents than on form, and the influence of Butler was at its climax.

CHARACTER OF OXFORD TEACHING

If Mr. Gladstone had gone to Oxford ten years earlier, he would have found the Ethics and the Rhetoric treated, only much less effectively, in the Cambridge method, like dramatists and orators, as pieces of literature. As it was, Whately's common sense had set a new fashion, and Aristotle was studied as the master of those who know how to teach us the right way about the real world.[36]Aristotle, Butler, and logic were the new acquisitions, but in none of the three as yet did the teaching go deep compared with modern standards. Oxford scholars of our own day question whether there was even one single tutor in 1830, with the possible exception of Hampden, who could expound Aristotle as a whole—so utterly had the Oxford tradition perished.[37]

The time was in truth the eve of an epoch of illumination, and in these epochs it is not old academic systems that the new light is wont to strike with its first rays. The summer of 1831 is the date of Sir William Hamilton's memorable exposure,[38]in his most trenchant and terrifying style and with a learning all his own, of the corruption and 'vampire oppression of Oxford'; its sacrifice of the public interests to private advantage; its unhallowed disregard of every moral and religious bond; the systematic perjury so naturalised in a great seminary of religious education; the apathy with which the injustice was tolerated by the state and the impiety tolerated by the church. Copleston made a wretched reply, but more than twenty years passed before the spirit of reform overthrew the entrenchments of academic abuse. In that overthrow, when the time came, Mr. Gladstone was called to play a part, though hardly at first a very zealous one. This was not for a quarter of a century; for, as we shall soon see, both the revival of learning and the reform of institutions at Oxford were sharply turned aside from their expected course by the startling theological movement that now proceeded from her venerable walls.

What interests us here is not the system but the man; and never was vital temperament more admirably fittedby its vigour, sincerity, conscience, compass, for whatever good seed from the hand of any sower might be cast upon it. In an entry in his diary in the usual strain of evangelical devotion (April 25, 1830) is a sentence that reveals what was in Mr. Gladstone the nourishing principle of growth: 'In practice the great end is that the love of God may become thehabitof my soul, and particularly these things are to be sought;—1. The spirit of love. 2. Of self-sacrifice. 3. Of purity. 4. Of energy.' Just as truly as if we were recalling some hero of the seventeenth or any earlier century, is this the biographic clue.

Gladstone constantly reproaches himself for natural indolence, and for a year and a half he took his college course pretty easily. Then he changed. 'The time for half-measures and trifling and pottering, in which I have so long indulged myself, is now gone by, and I must do or die.' His really hard work did not begin until the summer of 1830, when he returned to Cuddesdon to read mathematics with Saunders, a man who had the reputation of being singularly able and stimulating to his pupils, and with whom he had done some rudiments before going into residence at Christ Church. In his description of this gentleman to his father, we may hear for the first time the redundant roll that was for many long years to be so familiar and so famous. Saunders' disposition, it appears, 'is one certainly of extreme benevolence, and of a benevolence which is by no means less strong and full when purely gratuitous and spontaneous, than when he seems to be under the tie of some definite and positive obligation.' Dr. Gaisford would perhaps have put it that the tutor was no kinder where his kindness was paid for, than where it was not.

CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION

The catholic question, that was helping many another and older thing to divide England from Ireland, after having for a whole generation played havoc with the fortunes of party and the careers of statesmen, was now drawing swiftly to its close. The Christ Church student had a glimpse of one of the opening scenes of the last act. He writes to his brother (Feb. 6th, 1829):—

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